When I Was A Child
When I was a child
I was uprooted like a weed of lightning
and cast like a dead snake
on a festering heap of garbage.
I was angry before I knew
what anger was;
and ever since
radical dismissals
have cored the diamond drills
of their vacuity into my heart,
sudden abandonments
for no reason; the wind
slamming the door on my fingers,
rejection repealing
the flawed doctrine of my skin.
Pariah, poet, exile, outlaw, heretic,
I was passed a shard
of the broken jug of the moon
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poem by Patrick White
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Stranger In The Leaving
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
Is it not always so
when people separate?
Lovers who knew each other intimately for years
close their gates to each other
and say each others' name
as if they weren't philosopher's stones anymore.
And the base metal outweighs the gold that comes of it.
Alone with the alone
in the abyss of the absolutes
what was vivid and vital
turns numb as glass
and what was mystically specific about the other
is no longer a shrine that holds the secret name of God.
Stranger in the leaving
than you were before you came.
You leave with some of my memes
as I leave with some of yours
and we are both no doubt slightly changed for good
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poem by Patrick White
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If Only There Were One Word I Could Say
If only there were one word I could say
that could reach out and touch your sorrow,
a cool kiss of moonlight on the eyelid of a widowed rose.
If there were a way to make it better,
to wake you up from the pain you are living,
a dream of rain on a kinder windowpane in the morning.
If I could mend what was broken
beyond feeling and thought and goodness
how could I not feel the piercings of the wounded voodoo doll
victimized by her own mortality
as I am by my own
and pull the pins out of her butterflies
as readily as I would pull the quills out of a dog's nose?
Accustomed to grief, accustomed to hearing
someone crying in the backyard of the house next door,
at three in the morning, accustomed to observing
the angry solitude of the skate-boarder
always out alone on the abandoned street
as if that were his lonely girlfriend,
trying to figure out why the embittered old woman
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poem by Patrick White
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At The Crossroads Of Martyrs And Reptiles
At the crossroads of martyrs and reptiles,
annihilation's easy enough. It's carrying on
that's hard. All my emotions are feathered
like crows or osprey, hermit thrush, Canada geese,
and the occasional humming bird but that doesn't mean
they're perched in an aviary, or forgotten
what it was like when they had scales.
I've softened as I've aged. Molars and mountains
worn down like a planet in the tides of time and the stars.
I used to embroider my emotions in blood
on pillowcases full of razorblades that had
as many phases as the moon has thorns,
broken stained-glass windows, the shards
of shattered mirrors. I lived like stolen
radioactive material in a black market
with no flower-stalls, though I was raised
in a city of gardens with hanging baskets
dripping from the lamp posts outside the pawn shop,
with three full moons of leprous white globes
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poem by Patrick White
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The Ironic Smile Of A Sword That's Tasted Blood
The ironic smile of a sword that's tasted blood.
Bless the slayer who wounds me. I've been
hemorrhaging roses ever since. And bless
the tormentors of the heretical truth, voice coaches all
who taught me to sing in the fire to no one
without feeling the pain. Bless the executioner
for dropping the double-bladed axe of the moon
on the nape of my neck. I transcended thought,
tore all the wire-mesh down from
the home-made aviaries of my voice
and released all my cages from the grasp of my doves
in a slum of rapture that pitied the landlords
who had none. I bless the manipulator who taught me
how to love the joys of spontaneous chaos without contrast
and the psychosexual sadist with the intimate private life
of an X-rated hardware store who sold me a sabre saw
that allowed me to cut my umbilical cord to the puppet masters
and fly without strings like a burning box-kite among the birds.
O, and the long erosive sorrows of an afterlife
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poem by Patrick White
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When Rage Broke Down Into Tears
When rage broke down into tears
over the shattered chandeliers of stars
that crashed against your windowpane
before they thawed in the furnace
of a Promethean thief of fire
human enough to burn,
and you cried, yes you did, I was there,
I took the splinter of light out of your eye
with the corner of the sky where Venus
goes down in the west like the crumb
of a radiant dream that wanted to break
loaves and fishes with the masses
only to find you were swimming through glass;
you cried as if all the birds in the world
had died under your windowsill
like the words to the song
you were dancing to at the time.
And you picked them up one by one
and cradled them in your hand
like a midwife with a manger
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poem by Patrick White
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There Are Masks
There are masks I will not wear,
backstage wardrobes I won't dress up in,
lives someone else can star in,
fires that will never feather my voice,
or sweep the shadows
from my palace of ice and eyes,
faces that will never hang like fruit
from any bough of my being,
daggers I won't bury in the wounds
they inflicted like mouths
the tongue has been cut out of,
dignities of desire
that will not circle the roadkill,
my wings linked to the foodchain.
My heart will never labour
like the ox of a bell under a yoke,
though I plough the starfields;
nor will I fill its rivers
with leeches and eclipses
and let it sip the blood of others
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poem by Patrick White
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Even When Life Sometimes Seems Like A Black Hole
for Rebekah Genevieve-Dolorese Garland
Even when life sometimes seems like a black hole,
a dark furnace full of the ashes of burnt roses,
it shapes the galaxies into sunflowers and starfish
and it's whirling with stars like a Sufi in rapture.
All my life I've tried so hard not to be afraid of my joy
and at home with my grief like a comfortable chair
that was beginning to take on the same airs as my body.
A holy war of one, carrying the true cross of the sixties
I thought was worth fighting for even long after
I realized I was doomed to dancing to the music
for the rest of the duration. And it's been as true
as Jim Morrison living the afterlife of Arthur Rimbaud
in deserts so desolate even the stars were shy of the darkness.
And I have wept bitterly as the moon went down
like a toxic goat skull into the only wishing well
for light years around, and it seemed, and it's
still dangerous to remember because time doesn't blunt all knives,
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poem by Patrick White
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Promethean Contentions
My life the wardrobe of a shabby star; here,
take this carnelian pomegranate
that has hardened into a heart
and appease what blood you can, take my tongue
that turned yellow with arsenic in the fall
and was torn down like the flag of an ancient catastrophe
by the denuding expletives of the wind.
I'm tired of the ashes and the cemetery wine
that pollutes them; I'm weary of the view,
this worm-eaten map to nowhere
and the lies it must live to fulfill.
I've exhausted the patience
of the bookish rain,
waiting for my shoes to stop talking
about journeys they'll never take,
so that I can tell them I was a man
with a tarnished direction
that led me off the known roads
to taste the wild blackberries
that ripened in brambles of razorwire.
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poem by Patrick White
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Answering The Wolf
Answering the wolf.
Its agony, my own.
Its long howl of irreproachable pain
enough to silence the mountains
with trepidation before something holy.
Desecration. A photo. Two dozen wolf corpses
pouring over the tail-gate of a pick-up.
The bounty of two happy hunters
kneeling beside their rifles
as if something had been accomplished
it would be worth telling their children about.
Hard truth. Here is a human. My species.
It can do this to anything that lives.
From blue algae to Auschwitz,
Uganda, Syria, Wounded Knee.
Whales, buffalo, Sabra and Shatila, the Amazon,
twenty-five million famished children a year,
an avalanche of wolves at the back of a pick-up.
Beyond wanting to know why
there's this black spot
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poem by Patrick White
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